As a theatrical documentary, this "Is One Hundred Years Long" is obviously a substandard and disappointing work.
The film's director, Xiao Han, has made the highly rated documentary "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City", which was a hit on the B-site, and was much talked about by viewers for its vivid documentation and detailed portrayal of the artisanal spirit of the Palace's artifact restorers.
It was because of this passion for the subject of traditional Chinese craftsmen that Xiao Han spent another year making a documentary about traditional crafts called "Is 100 Years Long".
And in the process of filming this documentary, Xiao Han's team met two dramatic characters, Huang Zhongjian, a young man who learns Cai Li Fo Boxing and is obsessed with lion dances in Foshan, and Ahmet, an old man who makes saddles for the Kazakhs in Xinjiang, and then filmed the two men's lives in the past year to make this theatrical version of the movie.
It's fair to say that Is a Hundred Years Long is a rather ill-conceived hit.
The documentary originally aimed to show the spirit and attitude of the traditional craftsmen who have survived the storms of the past hundred years, but in the movie, the traditional crafts are shown in one stroke, and more of the hardships and struggles faced by the small people at the bottom of the hierarchy.
The theme of the movie is quite somber, as the documentary presents the choices and compromises faced by the two protagonists when they encounter problems such as ideals and reality, frustration and confusion, life and death, and illness.
The subject matter is very good, but unfortunately, the director handles the two characters in the same way as a drama film, with all kinds of noisy and deliberate editing and posing photography, as well as the imposition of soundtracks, which completely contradicts the original intention of the documentary's objectivity and truthfulness.
This drama approach doesn't really capture the character's flashpoints, but instead gives the film a cheap and bloody family ethical melodrama.
In particular, the body of the story between the two characters is completely unevenly distributed, and the story is even more completely fragmented, making it difficult to hold up the entire movie.
What's even more embarrassing is that the director even pioneered the idea of having the main character of a documentary blurt out advertising lines in order to implant ads in a documentary, which is really out of character.
Perhaps the director wanted to convey the message that "life is hard, but there is hope", but the effect of the film is--
The world is not worth living in, and it is better to die than to live.
So rather than a documentary, "Is 100 Years Long" is a real movie with real people in it.